Archive for September, 2008

Have you ever waited on a parallelized statement? Parallel execution is said to be fast, efficient, system-exhausting. Far from that! There’s a 10.2.0.4 x86_64 system with 16 cores and over 600MB/s write-IO ability, one statement running, one CPU burning, one developer waiting. For days.

Finally, at the end of the week, the admin is involved. Because people know, that the time when admins are working most efficiently is weekends and nights.

If anybody ever considers joining irc.freenode.net #oracle (what I’d recommend for all Oracle interested folks), be prepared for being treated like that:

<nayyares> it worked !!!
<usn> wait some time, it might crash, or restart all cluster
services to see if there is a boot bug
<nayyares> ok, i am monitoring usn
<Rudemeister> Im also monitoring usn
<Rudemeister> he's quite stable at the moment
* usn hits Rudemeister with a large, ugly, locking,
waiting, CPU-consuming SELECT!
<Rudemeister> thank for the fact I have you stuck in a
resource consumer group

But the video has a weak point: After randomizing the devices this way, you can’t simply pull the plug of one USB hub any more. Anyway, the demonstration is impressive. The usefulness of this feature is, that you can pull and plug the devices within one element of availability (here one USB hub) without caring for the right slot. Means: “swap the sticks only out of one USB hub at a time and retry the cable-plug gag successfully”.